The low-key but affecting Chilean drama "A Fantastic Woman," one of 2017â€™s Best Foreign Language Film nominees, restores the smooth melancholic power of the Alan Parsons Projectâ€™s â€śTime,â€ť long a staple of easy-listening radio. Here it feels like a deep bruise of loss.

A Fantastic Woman uses the common grief narrative and the less common transgender narrative to illuminate each other. Marina (Daniela Vega) is involved with an older but smitten businessman, Orlando (Francisco Reyes). After a night out for Marinaâ€™s birthday, followed by a loving night in, Orlando wakes up feeling ominously poorly. Within hours he is dying of an aneurysm, while she is symbolically locked out of the room where he is being ineffectually treated. The Parsons ballad plays twice â€” first during their last dance, when the song carries less meaning because we donâ€™t yet know itâ€™s their last dance, and then under the end credits, when it may bring a tear.

Marina is a transgender woman, and it becomes apparent that Orlandoâ€™s family hates her and considers her a freak â€” though I imagine they would also hate her if she were cisgender. Marinaâ€™s being transgender just gives Orlandoâ€™s ex-wife (Aline KĂĽppenheim) and adult though childish son (NicolĂˇs Saavedra) something to fixate on. Others make it an issue, too, and against the dramatic backdrop of Marinaâ€™s grief and loneliness, A Fantastic Woman shows the thousand cuts transgender people weather daily, the endless, casually dealt challenges to their dignity and humanity, the misgendering and prurience about their bodies.

What sets the movie apart and may make it a cult favorite is that the director, SebastiĂˇn Lelio, gives Marina a poker face that hides a more flamboyant view of herself. A fantasy sequence finds her doing one of those empowering Living Out Loud center-of-(positive)-attention dances in a club; right afterward, she walks home alone in the rain, but for a while, anyway, Marina transcends her world. A waitress by day, Marina is also an up-and-coming singer (Daniela Vega, also a singer as well as transgender herself, has a lovely voice); this seems to indicate the partitioned lives and identities of transpeople. Marinaâ€™s case attracts the attention of a detective named Adriana (Amparo Noguera), whose curiosity about Marina seems ambiguous. In a roundabout way, Adriana seems to think Marina killed Orlando in self-defense. Adriana has seen many cases involving transpeople, you see, and she knows how often they are assaulted. I canâ€™t decide whether this reasoning is transphobic or bitterly realistic or both. But because her job demands it, Adriana must think in this way, and Marina must contend with many other people who think that way, or worse.

The scene in which Orlandoâ€™s belligerent son and other family members take Marina for a non-consenting ride is uniquely upsetting, even though, other than wrapping Scotch tape around her head (a weird, weird detail thatâ€™s meant to silence her and temporarily deforms her), they donâ€™t physically harm her. Itâ€™s good, I guess, that this and a few standard epithets are all they have in them; their bark is worse than their bite, and even that is a tinny â€śarf.â€ť Itâ€™s debatable whether thatâ€™s worse than the scene in which sheâ€™s forced to bare first her upper half, then her lower half, for the camera of a police doctor. Or when she has to show her ID, which legally still displays her â€śdeadname.â€ť Or when Orlandoâ€™s ex-wife deadnames her. People like Marina of necessity develop a wary relationship to society, and the one person who loved her for who she was is dead.

A Fantastic Woman is and isnâ€™t an ironic title; Marina strives to be read as an average, un-fantastic woman, but thereâ€™s that chanteuse side of her, the side that fantasizes being lifted up on the dance floor. Marina daydreams about the glamour she thinks she canâ€™t have, but thereâ€™s a serene glamour in keeping oneâ€™s composure despite minute-by-minute chips taken out of oneâ€™s self-esteem, a million microaggressions. These concepts, obscure to the cisgender viewer, are smoothly advanced by way of a tragic tale of lost love.

Essentially, like "Living Out Loud" and "Truly, Madly, Deeply" and a ton of others, itâ€™s about a grieving woman who learns how to move on; such moviesâ€™ success depends more on what they do with this subject than on how original the subject is. "A Fantastic Woman" lets us see grief through a fresh pair of eyes.

OFFICIAL SELECTION: 2017 Toronto International Film Festival For more in the 2017 Toronto International Film Festival series, click here.
OFFICIAL SELECTION: 2017 AFI Fest For more in the 2017 AFI Fest series, click here.

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